Europe

Zelenskiy dismisses state security chief and prosecutor general, reports say

Russian missiles hit industrial facilities in the strategic city of Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine

A woman stands in front of her destroyed home following a Russian airstrike in the town of Toretske, in the Donetsk region, on Sunday. Photograph: Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images

Sun Jul 17 2022 - 20:50

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy issued executive orders late on Sunday sacking the head of Ukraine’s powerful domestic security agency, the SBU, and the prosecutor general.

The orders dismissing SBU chief Ivan Bakanov, a childhood friend of Mr Zelenskiy, and prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova, who led the effort to prosecute Russian war crimes in Ukraine, were published on the president’s official website.

In a separate Telegram post, Mr Zelenskiy said he had fired the top officials because many cases had come to light of members of their agencies collaborating with Russia.

He said 651 treason and collaboration cases had been opened against prosecutorial and law enforcement officials, and that more than 60 officials from Bakanov and Venediktova’s agencies were now working against Ukraine in Russian-occupied territories.

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“Such an array of crimes against the foundations of the national security of the state... pose very serious questions to the relevant leaders,” Mr Zelenskiy said.

“Each of these questions will receive a proper answer,” he said.

Mr Zelenskiy appointed Oleksiy Symonenko as the new prosecutor general in a separate executive order that was also published on the president’s site.

Meanwhile, Russian missiles hit industrial facilities in the strategic city of Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine on Sunday.

There was no immediate information about casualties.

Mykolaiv is a key shipbuilding centre in the estuary of the Southern Bug river. The city has faced regular missile attacks in recent weeks as the Russians have sought to soften Ukrainian defences.

The Russian military has declared a goal to cut off Ukraine’s entire Black Sea coast all the way to the Romanian border. If successful, such an effort would deal a crushing blow to the Ukrainian economy and trade and allow Moscow to secure a land bridge to Moldova’s separatist region of Transnistria, which hosts a Russian military base.

Elsewhere, a funeral was held for a four-year-old girl killed in an earlier strike. Liza, who had Down syndrome, was en route to see a speech therapist with her mother when a Russian missile struck the city of Vinnytsia in central Ukraine on Thursday.

At least 24 people were killed, including Liza and two boys aged seven and eight. More than 200 others were wounded, including Liza’s mother, who remains in an intensive care unit.

“I didn’t know Liza, but no person can go through this with calm,” priest Vitalii Holoskevych said as Liza’s body lay in a coffin with flowers and teddy bears. “We know that evil cannot win,” he added.

Russia is now preparing for the next stage of its offensive in Ukraine, according to a Ukrainian military official, after Moscow said its forces would step up military operations in “all operational areas”.

Russian rockets and missiles have pounded cities in strikes that Kyiv says have killed at least 40 people in the past three days.

“It is not only missile strikes from the air and sea,” Reuters reported Vadym Skibitskyi, a spokesman for Ukrainian military intelligence, as saying on Saturday. “We can see shelling along the entire line of contact, along the entire frontline. There is an active use of tactical aviation and attack helicopters . . . clearly preparations are now under way for the next stage of the offensive.”

The Ukrainian military said Russia appeared to be regrouping units for an offensive towards Sloviansk, a symbolically important city held by Ukraine in the eastern region of Donetsk.

The British defence ministry said on Sunday that Russia is reinforcing its defensive positions across the areas it occupies in southern Ukraine

The reinforcements include movement of manpower and equipment, defensive stores between Mariupol and Zaporizhzhia, and in Kherson, while Russian forces in Melitopol are also increasing security measures, the ministry wrote on Twitter in a regular bulletin.

In a statement on Saturday, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said: “No Russian missiles or artillery can break our unity.”

In an address on the anniversary of the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine, he added: “It should be equally obvious that it cannot be broken with lies or intimidation, fakes or conspiracy theories.”

Ukraine’s atomic energy agency has accused Russia of using Europe’s largest nuclear power plant to store weapons and shell the surrounding regions of Nikopol and Dnipro, which were hit on Saturday.

Petro Kotin, president of Ukrainian nuclear agency Energoatom, called the situation at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant “extremely tense”, with up to 500 Russian soldiers controlling it, Agence France-Presse reports.

The plant in southeast Ukraine has been under Russian control since the early weeks of Moscow’s invasion but is still operated by Ukrainian staff. — Agencies

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